Before I get into the subject of this article, let me wish everyone a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving. We tend to lose the meaning of this holiday that leads into the commercial end-of-year rush, starting with Black Friday…or earlier! It should be a time for personal contemplation about having family and friends and to give thanks for what we have in our lives. It’s not political or commercial but spiritual, a time to recognize our common humanity, something we share independently of political proclivities, religious preferences, or sexual orientation. We are all on spaceship Earth together, and we have a lot to be thankful for. Now, to the article….

While the sci-fi master Isaac Asimov certainly motivated me to write sci-fi—I read his first robot novel Caves of Steel at age twelve—I’m not Dr. Asimov. The ex-biochemist was also a master at writing popular science books that explained current science. I’ve failed miserably at that! A few blog posts, but not one book.

Like him, I’m a fan of Science News. Scientists are now super specialized in general, so we have to turn to more popular works like anyone else to see what other scientists are doing. I think both Isaac and I had that in common—we kept up with general scientific and technology progress in spite of our specializations. But the sci-fi master was already a generalist with many popular science books to prove it.

Of course, those books were also a respite from his sci-fi writing. His Foundation series is evidence for that. He wrote the Foundation trilogy, robot novels, and End of Eternity, and then he took a vacation of several decades to write all those popular science books. After that period, he returned to sci-fi and completed the Foundation series, bringing all those earlier novels together and continuing to write more, creating a masterful oeuvre the likes of which will never be seen again.

“Decades” is the key word. Like King and other famous genre fiction writers, Isaac Asimov got an early start. That’s difficult to do nowadays. I won’t complete two publishing decades until 2026…if I make it that far.

I’ve been tempted to write a few popular science books, but so much in that area is available now. In short, there’s no lack of authors and books explaining science. There’s also an apathy among readers who might otherwise read such books. Most people no longer care how things work; they just use the science and technology without thinking about it. There’s some interest in space science and astrophysics beyond sensationalism and controversy (is Pluto a planet?), but there’s also a societal disease where people think science is just belief and it’s responsible for society’s woes. And then there are the naysayers, deniers of global warming and climate change, or believers that the world was made 6000 years ago when humans were contemporaries of the dinosaurs (those fossils came from Noah’s flood, don’t you know?).

I would have a hard time channeling Dr. Asimov in such a toxic anti-science environment. True science is secular, but we’re becoming a belief-based society, even though the beliefs contradict facts. In one of the first Foundation books, there’s a scene where the principal confronts an archaeologist, telling him to prove his assertions by going out and digging up the evidence. The “scientist” refuses, saying that theories (his beliefs) are enough. Our scientists today haven’t gone to those extremes, but many in society have, denying scientific evidence while creating their own “theories” (intelligent design is the perfect example of an oxymoron, because the people who champion this belief ignore facts).

No, I’m not about to hit my head my head against the brick wall of public opinion. Let’s face it: it’s a lot more fun to write fiction that includes or extrapolates current scientific knowledge, allowing astute readers to see the possibilities in a fictional context. I just hope that my stories are enough to make Dr. Asimov happy. One can popularize science in many ways—mine are just a bit different than some of the old master’s.

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Comments are always welcome.

Evergreen Series: “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” Survivors of the Chaos starts with a dystopian Earth controlled by multinationals and their mercenaries, and ends with an expedition to the 82 Eridani star system. Sing a Zamba Galactica begins with first contact where Humans meet the strange ETs they name Rangers, and ends with a mercy mission where Humans convince one strange collective intelligence to cure another. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, a Human industrialist is bent on controlling near-Earth planets in the Galaxy, and Humans and their ET friends must try to stop him. Centuries of development in near-Earth space are covered in these novels, all three evergreen books; sci-fi is always current! And all three novels are contained in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bargain you can find wherever fine ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Today is a solemn but sad day, full of nostalgia and yearning. Fifty years ago, I was part of the party-like atmosphere in College Park, Maryland, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human being to set foot on the Moon. No good and wonderful event since then has brought the US and the world so much together to share our common humanity and hope for the future.

Space is the final frontier., but we have shied away from it and Armstrong’s hopeful and inspiring message, putting our petty and tribal squabbles ahead of that great adventure, going where no human has gone before. Will we return to space? The way into that final frontier is not to be found with militarized space commands, seeking to sully space with political saber rattling, but via a motivated and concerted effort by all human beings to go into that great beyond out of scientific curiosity. I don’t imagine that it will happen in my lifetime, if ever, which makes today doubly sad for me.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to all those courageous and intelligent space pioneers of the past. I regret that our collective myopia and efforts to further more trivial agendas have inhibited human beings’ reach for the stars. Hopefully we will come to our senses…sometime.

“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”—Isaac Asimov

It comes in two forms: we meet them out there, or those out there come here to Earth. In any case, the theme is ubiquitous in old sci-fi. I’m not sure how much it’s used today. Recent discussions in the media of UFO sightings (remember, UFO only means “unidentified flying object,” not an ET’s vehicle, in spite of NY Times crosswords’ clues) might increase tales about first contact. Who knows? So it might be worthwhile to study how believable such tales can be.

Both versions have the problem that “out there” means the vast reaches of intergalactic space…and beyond. I’ve already discussed this in a previous post. Either version means someone, either an ET or human being, has to travel so far that it’s hard to get our minds around what the distance is. But let’s assume that it can be done, that two groups, ETs and humans, could somehow get together for the first time and have a chat. Why would they or we want to do so?

For humans, we could say that it might just be curiosity or the challenge. That’s why people who know nothing about climbing want to climb Mt. Everest—even why those who do so attempt the climb. That’s why people decide to visit all the continents after they retire. And that’s the scenario for the colonization of Mars in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. But would that be enough to go to the stars?

Today isn’t 1969 or just before. I never bought into the competition with the Soviet Union to motivate the space race. Most people I knew didn’t. What motivated us was answering the question “Can we get to the moon?” We didn’t care about US pride or international politics. We were motivated by the challenge. Today one sees many people who even think going back to the moon is a waste of money. And the Pentagon certainly wouldn’t support that—all they probably want to do is put up more spy satellites, or sneak in a few satellites with nukes on them. And private industry just wants comsats and so forth where they can make lots of money. We’ve gone from sublime curiosity and meeting abstract challenges to greedy profit-making.

Sure we have a few visionaries like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and their ilk, but not even the general public supports space research anymore, unless NASA can do it on a shoestring budget. And the politicos take this attitude and run with it. Budget cuts are crippling the space agency, as they are most scientific research.

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It’s hard for anyone to get their head around how far away the stars are. The nearest, Proxima Centauri, is 4.243 light-years distant—a light-year is the distance traveled by light in a year, going at 186,000 miles per second!

Three Sol-like real stars (i.e. like our sun) are where the Human colonies of New Haven, Novo Mondo, and Sanctuary are located in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (a three-novel bundle from Carrick Publishing). In A.B. Carolan’s Mind Games, the main character visits two of those colonies, plus a much-changed Earth. The stars, 82 Eridani, Tau Ceti, and Delta Pavonis, respectively, are about twenty light-years from Earth. They’re G-type stars like our own. I started writing about these colonies around 2000, so I didn’t know if there were real Earth-type planets in those faraway solar systems. I still don’t.

Today scientists have discovered many real extrasolar planets. Some are in the zone where liquid water can exist, so a sci-fi writer today might choose one of those as a setting for a story. The stars I chose are still good ones, but if scientists find they have no planets or none are in that sweet spot relative to their parent star, I’m toast.

In addition, we now know some stars have a huge Jupiter-like planet in that sweet spot. That’s not a bad setting either because a planet like that can have a large moon that’s like Earth, full of life. Such is the case of Hard Fist, a satellite of Big Fellow, and where the action of A.B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns takes place.

When I began writing the books in the trilogy bundle above, no one knew if any stars besides ours had planets. At least now we know planets are ubiquitous. Three of my four fictional ones I’ve mentioned had life before Humans arrived. That might be less likely than being in that sweet spot—if water exists, it doesn’t mean life does. Both our moon and Mars have some water, for example, but no observable life.

Statistically it’s likely that life exists out there. It might not exist very close to Earth, though, as it does in my fiction. I’m thinking of an active biosphere, of course. Even Mars might have some life. And it’s unclear how long Earth will continue to have a biosphere unless we recognize the dangers of climate change. CCDs (that’s “climate change deniers”) are trying to get everyone to believe their lies.

Let’s consider some possibilities A.B. Carolan, in his short story “Harvest Time” two weeks ago in honor of Brian Aldiss, considers one possibility that’s also at the end of the first novel in the collection named above—a long-range starship. Its propulsion system, yet to be determined, would apply a constant acceleration and then a constant deceleration to arrive at the target star. Humans aboard might be in cryosleep or stored as frozen embryos, or even in banks of frozen sperm and ova, and the colonists could be woken at the end of the trip and nurtured by robots. Things could go wrong on the journey, as in A.B.’s short story.

Any attempts at organizing a galactic empire, or even a trade union like ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”), a la European Union, would require faster communication between planets than that provided via long-range starships. Faster-than-light travel (FTL) was invented by sci-fi writers for that purpose. Many old stories talked about hyperspace; Star Trek had its “warp drive”; and my stories have ships traveling through the metaverses provided by some esoteric theories from particle physics, superstring theories to be precise, as considered in yesterday’s short story “Shipwreck.” It all boils down to skirting Einstein’s theory of relativity by leaving our universe where the speed of light mentioned above limits all velocities.

Humans haven’t been around too long, geologically speaking, and have wondered what’s out there for even less time. The way things are going, we won’t be going out there anytime soon, no matter how organized we become to do it. Some wonder if what’s out there will come to us. Either way, the distances covered will truly be a star trek. And all that’s still in the realm of sci-f for now.

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Comments are always welcome.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Amazon reviewer S. D. Beallis called it “broad in scope and cautiously optimistic.” Amazon reviewer Debra Miller said she “was reminded at times of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.” Both comments indicate the epic nature of this one novel where an ET virus creates Homo sapiens 2.0, and then the new humans colonize Mars. Available on Amazon and Smashwords.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[Note: This can be considered a continuation of last Thursday’s post.]

Arthur C. Clarke’s quote is a good way to start this article: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is more than a glib remark from an old sci-fi writer. It is an important statement about technology.

Imagine a caveman from Earth’s prehistory holding a smart phone. He can’t call anyone and no one can call him, but he can hit a video replay icon, see the video unfolding, and drop the phone as if it were black magic. (He might react the same way with a mirror, of course.)

If we can’t explain something, we call it magic…or something fancier to make our ignorance more palatable. That’s how the phrases “dark energy” and “dark matter” came into existence—physicists are very inventive about hiding their ignorance. I don’t think they’d consider themselves in the same class as Ugh the caveman, but I don’t see much difference sometimes—Clarke probably wouldn’t either. (Of course, I could be wrong. For years I thought the Higgs field was just a mathematical device to generate spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory of Salam and Weinberg.)

Dark energy and dark matter express our ignorance about how to explain certain observed phenomena, though. It’s a bit different when we consider phenomena that seems to be more blatant about contradicting known physical laws. There’s magic in the extrapolation of the former needed to create good sci-fi stories. That magic differs from that used in fantasy stories. The boundaries are fuzzy, though, between these two situations.

Paranormal activity—the use of psi powers—has been featured in fantasy and sci-fi stories for a while. Unlike dark energy and dark matter, which was invented to “explain” some observed phenomena, paranormal activity has never been observed. That amounts to a double whammy against it.

Like time travel, I haven’t included psi powers very much in my sci-fi, in spite of a long-standing tradition of sci-fi authors of using it as a plot device. I generally consider psi powers to be more in the realm of fantasy. Yet in the three books of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, I include psi powers as a plot device, and in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second book, I consider time travel. Let me fall back on Mr. Clarke’s quote, though, to put both back in the hard sci-fi realm in order to assuage my guilt.

A.B. Carolan’s new book Mind Games goes farther. We have robots, but the androids go beyond commercial robots available today—these don’t exist either. So what does A.B. do? He writes about trying  to give androids psi powers. And he plops this down in the hard sci-fi universe I created.

Considering the aforementioned collection, I suppose he’s justified. The story is another sci-fi mystery for young adults where the main character Della wants to find out who murdered her adopted father. He had always told her to hide her powers, but she needs to use them all to solve the mystery.

Is this sci-fi or fantasy? Maybe those labels don’t matter. The main question might be: Is it a good story? You can read it and tell me via your reviews or emails.

I generally prefer a scientist’s approach in my sci-fi writing, taking known science and extrapolating it far beyond where a practicing scientist might go (any extrapolation is always dangerous), without contradicting current knowledge. Maybe the psi powers in A.B.’s book and my own are more an application of Clarke’s point of view than J.K. Rowling’s, more akin to physicists dark energy and dark matter and an expression of our wonder and ignorance about what might be true. Not fake science, just wild extrapolation far beyond what’s now known so that the science just seems like magic. Is Ugh the caveman smiling?

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Penny Castro is on a forensic dive off the SoCal coast for the LA County Sheriff’s Department. When she surfaces, she finds her fellow deputies and a witness dead from a virulent contagion. Follow her adventures as she struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print on Amazon and in your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them for it). This novel was published by Black Opal Books. Visit their website to see a treasure trove of great reads. Support small presses and their authors.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

As a scientist, I dealt with many equations. As a full-time writer, not so much. Many people know Newton’s F = ma. That equation, and its rotational form, τ = Iα, appear in Survivors of the Chaos (the first novel contained in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection). That’s about it for equations in my fiction.

Some people might think that Einstein’s equation linking the curvature tensor of space and time to the matter-energy tensor in General Relativity is the most important one in science, or Maxwell’s equation for the electromagnetic field (tensor form so it’s just one equation). The latter certainly has more application in our everyday lives than the former, if that’s important.

The most important equation, though, is exp (i π) + 1 = 0.

exp (i π) is usually written differently—e to the i times π—but I use the less common form to avoid superscripts. The functional notation exp ( . ) is shorthand for the irrational number e raised to some power. Here i is the imaginary unit that is the square root of -1; all complex numbers can be written in the form a + bi where a and b are real numbers. exp (i π) can be written that way too: cos(π) + i sin(π). The symbol π is the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter, and some readers might remember that cos(π) = -1 and sin(π) = 0.

So there you have it: that most important equation just says that -1 + 1 = 0. “Big deal!” you might say. Well, it says that in a most beautiful and profound way, connecting the five most important numbers in mathematics. First 1, the first natural number, the numbers used in counting; second, 0, an important human invention signifying nothing, but also used as a placeholder, as in 1000; e and π, the two most important irrational numbers in the set of real numbers; and finally i, needed to create the complex numbers so important to scientists and engineers.

Why do these numbers link up this way? Maybe that’s not the right question. The better question: Isn’t the discovery that they do link up this way in one equation more important than any physical law ever discovered? There’s something immutable and unchangeable about this equation beyond any other in science.

Think about it. True science is empirical. Experimental data lead to “laws” like F = ma that explain many natural phenomena, but Newton’s law must be modified to explain special relativistic effects occurring at high velocities. There’s nothing empirical about exp (i π) + 1 = 0 at all. It would exist for some ETs living at the bottom of a methane ocean under huge pressures, or on a planet in the 82 Eridani star system (they’re there, and you can read about them in Sing a Zamba Galactica, novel #2 in the collection mentioned above). The symbols they might use in the equation could be different—maybe just sonograms—but that doesn’t matter.

That equation exists without any phenomena at all, and it can be considered a cornerstone of universal mathematics. It’s a mathematical tautology of the utmost importance.

Think about it this way: the equation connects natural numbers, integers, real numbers including two fundamental irrational numbers (ratios of integers are rational numbers), and complex numbers. The only thing that this equation doesn’t include are quaternions, the biggest set of numbers that includes them all that scientists sometimes use to describe three-dimensional rotations.

Now, isn’t that one beautiful equation?

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Comments are always welcome.

Mind Games. You know A. B. Carolan as the writer of The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns. Those novels are sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart). In Mind Games, A. B. tells a new story that’s set a bit farther into the future than his first two books. Della Dos Toros is a young girl with psi powers living in the Dark Domes of the planet Sanctuary. Her adopted father doesn’t let her use those powers, but she must do so to find his killer. This story about ESP and androids adds another action-packed novel to the ABC Sci-Fi Mystery series. Available in both print and ebook versions.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

NASA scientists have just confirmed that the brilliant fireball seen in the southern US corresponded to the crash landing of an alien spaceship containing four distinct species of ETs. The skeletal remains indicate different bone structures, one with four legs and two arms. Preliminary investigations also indicate four different variations on DNA components and/or handedness of key amino acids. Stay tuned for further information.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is a funny movie about a serious topic. It’s not a movie for little kids, by the way. I’m sure they’ll have no idea what a TED talk is, and young computer users will also have no idea about the many references to general culture, social media, and websites contained in the movie (have they seen King Kong?) Maybe the movie is for computer-savvy young adults from a certain age on to where we find elders who aren’t computer users beyond email and maybe Skyping with family and friends. The mix of real and fake internet companies can be confusing to most of us computer savvy people too. But breaking the internet is a moot point—it’s already broken!

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t attend an EU meeting about excesses in social media—doesn’t even bother to cancel. Sheryl Sandberg launches a secret campaign against George Soros to investigate his finances—he committed the sin of attacking Facebook. And Facebook has been caught using the information it’s gathered to favor friends and punish enemies.

Google is fined by the EU for a multitude of reasons. Facebook and Twitter put profit over morality by letting real fake news be plastered on everyone’s feeds, including that from the Russians designed to disrupt the U.S. electoral process. Wikileaks releases thousands of emails Russians hacked from DNC servers. At this writing, the RNC is claiming some unknown hacker invaded their databases.

Data mining firms collect information from your social media presence, text messages, and emails, and that list of data mining firms includes big names like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who also sell your information for profit. In fact, that’s their general business model; all those annoying ads flashing on your screen represent only a small part of their profits.

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[Note from Steve: Not exactly a movie review…or is it a review of two?]

While I reviewed Andy Weir’s book (Oct. 16, 2015), I don’t think I reviewed the movie with Matt Damon, which I saw (readers can confirm that by perusing the movie review archive—I couldn’t find one). I’m sure I won’t see First Man. Ryan Gosling can’t compare to everyman Matt Damon, but that’s not the main point of this article. My intention is to compare the focus of these two movies.

Although The Martian is clearly fiction, both movies are fictional, the second being historical fiction, of course. They’re both about space exploration, the first about exploring Mars and the second about exploring Luna. That’s where the similarities end.

First Man focuses on the past, namely astronaut Neil Armstrong. It’s a screen biopic. Nothing against Armstrong, who has been made into a folk hero, but it’s the focus on the past that bothers me. The U.S. government has all but destroyed NASA. They shut down the shuttle program and didn’t replace it. We’ve been forced to pay Russia to haul our astronauts to the ISS. Now that Russia’s rockets are having problems (the last one failed and came close to killing a cosmonaut and astronaut), we are basically excluded from manned spaceflight for the present. All of this is due to ill-advised budget cutting by various administrations, and public opinion seems to have gone along with it, saying we can no longer afford space exploration. Many of us have shed a few tears—space is the last frontier, and our pioneering spirit is dead!

A similar thing happened to the SSC (“Superconducting Super Collider”), cancelled by Congress. We have ceded our lead in space exploration to the Europeans and Russia; we have ceded our lead in particle physics to the Europeans (CERN). Per capita, other countries are spending far more on non-military R&D than the U.S. Worse, that parallels huge U.S. increases in military R&D.

All that looks backward at an ignoble past where past glories are forgotten as scientific research takes a back seat. Sure, it was great to step on the moon in 1969, but can we swallow the bitter pill of knowing we couldn’t reproduce that feat now, even if there was a desire to do so?

The Martian has a more positive outlook. Forget about the moon. Let’s look to Mars and beyond. While the book and the movie still tells the tale of budget-cutting bureaucrats fighting those who want scientific progress, it shows that a few plucky heroes can still get it done! The Martian is positive and First Man is negative exactly for those reasons.

Of course, Weir’s story suffers the same failings as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The latter has pages and pages of narrative about undersea flora and fauna. Excess narrative is characteristic of many 19^th century novels, from Moby Dick to Pride and Prejudice, and it’s damn boring. Weir’s narrative is too—worse than a manual for turning whale blubber into lamp oil (Moby Dick), it’s a manual for growing potatoes in human excrement.

But The Martian looks forward in a positive way that First Man can never do. That makes a big difference. Both movies are sad. First Man looks sadly back at NASA’s glory days. The Martian sadly reminds us of what might have been if our leaders weren’t so stupid. Yet looking forward is always better than looking backward. We can’t change the past, but maybe we can change the future? You don’t have to see either movie to make a choice here.

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Comments are always welcome!

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. One reviewer compared this novel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. The first part is about how an ET virus creates homo sapiens version 2.0 on Earth, though. The second is about how these new humans colonize Mars and discover a starship of ETs who sent the virus to Earth. The ebook is available on Amazon and Smashwords and all its affiliates.

In libris libertas!

We all know how Facebook contributed, unknowingly or otherwise, to elect Trump and support BREXIT. If not intentionally, then their business model needs serious fixing; if intentionally, someone needs to go to jail! Other social media sites, email services, and web browsers are also guilty of sharing our personal information with anyone who will pay them money.

How does this affect authors? Why should we be concerned? Because nowadays social media and email are valuable tools in many ways, we would like to know that it can be trusted to keep our readers’ information safe. It’s now obvious we can’t do that.

Verizon owns both AOL and Yahoo now. Google’s Gmail is required by many cellphone providers. All three, like Facebook and Twitter, have privacy policies that allow them to steal information from those emails and sell it. The big boys are up to their necks in data mining. It’s not just the data-mining firms anymore.

Microsoft hasn’t done anything particularly wrong (I don’t know about Bing if it still exists, or their mail packages), but they are terribly annoying. It used to be that I could pick and choose what updates I wanted in Win 8.1 or Win 10. Now I can’t. Even worse, Microsoft now takes over my computer, downloads, and installs crap that I never use.  My choices are “Update and Shutdown” or “Update and Restart”—when that takes valuable time away from my writing, you can imagine how I curse Bill Gates and his band of thieves. I should also mention that they’ve decided not to support certain versions of Office so they can charge me for a new one. That’s not just abuse—it’s highway robbery!

Add to all that the Dark Web where I’ve seen pirated versions of ebooks, including my own, offered for free, and one has to wonder if the internet is an author’s friend. But it doesn’t stop there. Net neutrality is dead. Congress killed it. Authors’ businesses are small potatoes compared to mega-corporations. Don’t you think that internet service providers will coddle the users who will pay more? I already experience daily several periods of slowdowns or drop-outs as Comcast panders to their big money clients. They’d rather have gamers and streaming video watchers hogging the bandwidth than tend to an author’s needs. Nobody reads anymore, right? Literacy and reading be damned.

The only thing an author can do is to speak out against this abuse from tech companies. They’ll probably try to make sure the word won’t get out, of course, but the word is already out. And we can always attack them in our fiction. In libris libertas…and let’s have a saner and safer internet!

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Did you miss The Secret Lab? This sci-fi mystery for young adults features four tweens in the future living on the International Space Station who try to discover the origins of a mathematical mutant cat. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all their affiliated ebook retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo etc) and in a print version on Amazon.  And don’t miss the next A. B. Carolan YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—coming soon!

In libris libertas!